BNY Mellon's Kumar Uses Metrics To Make Better Business Decisions

Suresh Kumar uses metrics extensively as he helps Bank of New York Mellon prepare for the future and create a culture of excellence.

For Suresh Kumar, executive VP and CIO at Bank of New York Mellon (New York, $1.4 trillion in assets), technology serves two main functions in his professional life: to help the bank's clients be successful, and to mine data analytics to help the business make better decisions. Indeed, Kumar is a man who loves metrics.

"For me, it's not as much about the technology as it is about changing the culture to create a culture of excellence and culture of measurement," says Kumar, who manages about 13,000 IT professionals and oversees a division that has a $2 billion annual budget. "We have made tremendous progress in goal-setting and identifying measures of success and how we track progress. We want that to be institutionalized and become part of the DNA of our organization."

Kumar says that ability to track and measure is the real potential of big data. Regarding big data, he says there is a tendency "for companies to do a project here and project there because this is the hot new thing. But we want to take advantage of technology and use data insight to make better decisions. I call it decision science, rather than big data."

With the substantial number of transactions BNY Mellon processes on a daily basis, Kumar believes there is a "tremendous opportunity" to take advantage of new data analytics tools available. He believes this is applicable not only to client data, but employee data, as well.

To that end, Kumar spearheaded BNY Mellon's Digital Workplace initiative, which was designed to improve and enhance the employee experience, productivity and knowledge. The goal of the initiative was to reduce downtime, complaints, failures and help desk calls, and increase collaboration across the company, innovation, productivity and satisfaction.

"Our focus was to use the technology and analytics capabilities we have to figure out what our employees are trying to get done and how to help them do it better," he says. "We thought, 'How do you measure the employee experience and improve that?'"

So the bank launched a massive campaign to garner employee feedback on every aspect of their jobs. Kumar and his tech team also used big data analytics software from Splunk to analyze unstructured internal data to understand behaviors and user actions.

Tools To Drive Collaboration

One finding was that employees were seeking more tools for collaboration, and BNY Mellon is working on enhancing internal collaboration tools. Kumar and his team also discovered which applications were used more or less frequently than others, and how to improve the user experience for some internal tools.

For example, Kumar says that Microsoft Outlook applications were taking a longer time to launch than should be expected. Analyzing the data received as part of the Digital Workplace initiative, Kumar and his team discovered that there were "a whole bunch of add-ins that people didn't really use" associated with Outlook, and so they were disabled. Since then, Kumar reports, the time to launch Outlook applications has been reduced by 63%.

Kumar has a long history of bringing innovative technologies to bear for institutional clients. He was a pioneer in creating online brokerages. In the late 1980s, while working at Pershing, a provider of securities services that's now a subsidiary of BNY Mellon, he helped create an online brokerage system for the Prodigy online service. Later, in the 1990s, he worked on creating online brokerages systems for AOL. Kumar has essentially been with one company his whole career, but as he puts it, "with many different parents." In 2000, Credit Suisse acquired DLJ Securities Corp., which at that time was the parent company of Pershing. Also that year, Kumar helped Pershing form a new company, iNautix India, a reseller of technology. In 2003, Pershing was acquired from Credit Suisse by the Bank of New York, which itself merged with Mellon in 2007. At that time, Kumar was already CIO of Pershing.

Another data-related initiative in which Kumar has been involved was the 2012 launch of BNY Mellon Xtreme Computing Platform to harness innovations ranging from big data and mobility to virtualization.

The platform is the third generation of a constantly evolving architecture Kumar developed at Pershing in 1994. It has evolved into a consolidated technology architecture and platform approach that dramatically streamlines and improves the bank's systems and lays the groundwork for future advances that, ultimately, will save time and money.

At the foundation of this platform, notes Kumar, is Data Center as a Service, which is BNY Mellon's private cloud. This service allows for auto-provisioning and efficient use of computing resources, he says. On top of that are common services, such as workflow management tools, and business services, including business-specific capabilities such as cash services, trade services and collateral management, which can be bundled to provide a more customized user experience.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio

Metrics also create goals. Without a timeline and targets a goal is just a dream. Kumar's strategy is providing the catalyst to and means to make necessary changes.

The example of metrics directing attention to Outlook's slow load time due to unused ad-ins is a great example of how analytics can make you rethink every-day issues. In this case, it was a small, solvable problem with large-scale benefits. Kumar is definitely on the right path.

Kumar's strategy is spot on. Today, it seems that everyone is focused on metrics and measurement (You can't manage what you don't measure). And metrics based decision making shows no signs of being a 'fad' or the business flavor of the month, especially since managers can point to metrics to justify decisions.

Kumar's comments about regulatory compliance are right on, in my opinion. It would be great to see/hear more bank executives (not just in IT) adopt this perspective and move beyond complaining and resistance. His focus on metrics and mining data for customer, product and employee insights show how extensively these kinds of investments (tools and platforms) can be leveraged if they are not just viewed as costs of doing business.